Lucien Freud (1922-2011)
Freud was a figurative painter and draughtsman.
After a series of missteps, Freud attended The East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing and the Goldsmith College Central School of Art in London. His early career was influenced by surrealism.
After World War II, Freud focused on portraiture. His work was somber, thickly impastoed, and set in unsettling interiors and urban landscapes. Although he painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (2000-2001), he preferred to paint his friends and family.
Freud worked from life studies and was known for asking his models to sit for long periods of time. He took a special interest in nudes. He highlighted and undercut the erotics of the female nude, rejecting the idealizing tendencies of Western art. He painted extreme body types. Among his most famous and lucrative was Benefits Supervisor Sleeping.
Influenced by Durer and Rembrandt, Freud became interested in self-portraiture. Lucien Freud: The Self Portraits 1940s is a series of forty works on canvas, paper, and etching plate. He depicted himself from the forties to the early twenty-first century, showing an ongoing study of the process of aging. In 1983, he was appointed a Companion of Honor and a member of the Order of Merit in 1993.
Freud is regarded as one of the foremost twentieth century portraitists working in the representational style.
